"The Godfather" was a great movie adaptation, if for no other reason than Coppola was wise enough to say "Yeah, we probably shouldn't spend so much time dwelling on Lucy Mancini's gynecological problems."

Brokeback was a short story, not a book. Speaking of which, the inclusion of Kings's Different Seasons makes no mention of which film is considered for the adaptation. Obvious guess is Rita Hayworth but The Body was magnificent as well. Apt Pupil was a bore.

divgradcurl:NeoCortex42: Seriously, how do you fark up Sphere that bad?

agreed. same thing applies to 'congo.' jurassic park was a pretty good movie, just nowhere near as interesting as the book.

I think Sphere and Congo simply work better as books and really never had a realistic shot at being good movies unless most of the source material was dumped.

If I recall correctly, the movie Sphere was actually pretty faithful to the book. What they should have done was completely rewrite acts II and III -- pretty much what's done with every Philip K. Dick adaption.

Congo should have never been a movie. The book was fast paced and entertaining, but there was just no way that a movie adaption, no matter how loose of an adaptation, was not going to be silly.

WippitGuud:RoyHobbs22: Brokeback was a short story, not a book. Speaking of which, the inclusion of Kings's Different Seasons makes no mention of which film is considered for the adaptation. Obvious guess is Rita Hayworth but The Body was magnificent as well. Apt Pupil was a bore.

If you click on the book, it tells you which story... and it's the one you missed: Stand By Me.

I disagree about Lolita. Kubrick had to censor the content so much it doesn't get nearly as dark as the book does. The TV version with Jeremy Irons came closer, but I doubt that Lolita will ever be made into an accurate film, due to the need of having a child actor simulating sex.

born_yesterday:Lady Beryl Ersatz-Wendigo: born_yesterday: Last of the Mohicans? Didn't see it on there.

Did you ever read the original novel? To think, we missed out on Daniel Day-Lewis disguising himself as a bear.

I confess I did not. However, they showed the movie on the History or some such channel, and I recall a historian praising the pacing of the movie, and calling Cooper's prose somewhat laborious. I was curious whether this opinion was reinforced in this list. How does it compare to the pace of Moby Dick?

Cooper could meander a bit, and some of his plotting was outright ridiculous. Moby Dick was paced better. But there's no cetology in Cooper, so I guess you have to take the rough with the smooth.

I highly recommend Mark Twain's literary beatdown of Cooper if you haven't read it already: Link

No one liked it, but I thought "The Lovely Bones" did a good job of passing along the mood of the book. And Ang Lee did a wonderful job with "The Life of Pi" even if he couldn't quite nail it. The movie exists as its own form of art separate from the novel.

"The Lovely Bones" was still a better book. It's been a long time since I've read something that grabbed me from the beginning not with a story, but with the writing.